It’s been a pretty busy spring and summer this year, but we’ve still had time to have a fine and successful square-foot garden experiment on the side of the house. Back in mid-April, it was pretty much just a plot with dirt. Now here we are in mid-July, and the garden is going mad. Here’s a link to the set so far; a few highlights:
The peas Will and I planted from seed back in late April/early May have come and gone– we got two good meals worth of stir-fried snow peas (with other things, of course).
The lettuce was great too; I think we must have gotten at least a dozen salads out of that. We’re about to leave town tomorrow, but I think that Will and I are going to plant a mix of green beans and carrots after we get back.
And those tomato plants are freakin’ huge! We’ll see what the actual tomatoes look like though.
The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.
One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:
Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.
The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.
What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.
I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.
Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.
As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:
And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.
I sort of watch American Idol, sort of don’t care, etc. Last night, we actually ended up over at some friends’ house after dinner watching the big finale, and everyone in the room– even children– remarked at the crappiness of the last song that both finalists had to both sing. Then this morning, I was greeted with this Facebook update from my friend and colleague Bill Hart-Davidson: “RT @spinuzzi: Kara’s song was the Kobyashi Maru of American Idol. (Heh. If that’s a spoiler, welcome to geek club!).”
Indeed. Only neither Adam nor Kris changed the outcome/rules of the song enough to “win” it.
Last week, Annette and I took some time on a Tuesday to go to Blocks Stand and Nursery to buy a wide variety of plants for cheap, including everything now in the square foot veggie garden seen here– except the peas, which Will and I planted from seed a few weeks before. I suppose if I was a “real gardener,” I’d grow everything from seeds, and I’d preferably start growing seedlings in about February under some light in my basement. But since I’m not a “real gardener,” I buy fairly large plants ready to go into the ground for that impressive, “wow he must be a real gardener” look.
Will and I did most of the planting together on Saturday last weekend. Will simultaneously complained about the work and diligently planted things, as if he was unsure if he was supposed to think that gardening “sucked” or was fun. We had some cold weather that could have been a freeze, but nothing so bad as to damage the crops. And at this point, I think weather-wise we are in the clear. I think.
As you can see from the picture (if you click on it, you can seem more or less a map of what’s here), we’ve got lots of tomatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash. For whatever reason, we don’t seem to get that much zucchini or yellow squash from the CSA farm where we get a share of produce, and tomatoes you grow in your yard are always the best. I’m attempting to grow the zukes and squash “up” with the help of tomato cages; we’ll see how that goes.
I also mixed up Mel’s mix for flower pots, hanging baskets, and window boxes too. I’ll be curious to see how that works out because I think it is basically a somewhat better deal than buying potting mix at a place like Home Depot, and it is more satisfying to make your own, too.
From today’s Ann Arbor News, “Ann Arbor area homeowners – like those across the country – struggle with “underwater” mortgages.” The short version is that we too probably owe more than our house is actually worth. Now, I guess we’re lucky/fortunate in the sense that we aren’t that underwater (some of the people in this article are more like $80K upside-down, and we’re nowhere near that) and short of some unforeseen disaster, we have secure jobs and will be able to keep making our payments.
Still, it’s frustrating, and it is especially frustrating when you do everything you’re supposed to do as a responsible citizen and the only people who seem to be catching a break in terms of refinancing houses and negotiating deals with banks are people who were always way in over their heads. I mean, if we had had one of these goofy balloon mortgages and were telling the bank that we couldn’t afford to pay anymore, we might get some help. But since we are homeowners who just want some kind of break to be able to refinance, we’re getting nothing. Oddly, I wonder if we’d have a better chance of getting a banker’s attention if we just stopped paying our mortgage. Which, of course, we aren’t going to do.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Annette has grown weary of being on hold for an hour at a time only to be told by the bankers that we are SOL; I might give it a whirl next week.
First, I probably am going to once again migrate my desk to a different part of the house, the study area upstairs where Annette has a desk space in theory, but only in theory since she generally is more comfortable and productive working not at a desk at all. Kind of like Richard Branson, though with considerably less money.
Second, if I just cleaned my desk once in a while, I might actually have something worthy of an “elegant” and maybe even “beautiful” desk set-up. And cleaning would be another form of procrastination from grading. Must… resist….
We’re trying a new gardening experiment this year: a long version of a Squarefoot Garden to suit the space we have. We don’t have a lot of sun, and this narrow space between our house and our neighbors (out of the picture, but probably less than ten feet away) is actually the only part of our yard where we’ve had any luck growing tomatoes over the years; thus this modification, which is two feet wide and sixteen feet long.
Of course, we can’t even think about planting much (maybe some seeds? maybe stuff like chard?) until after Mother’s Day because of frost and the like.
Depending on how commenting on essays, meeting with students, and generally wrapping up the term goes next week, I might be able to work up a batch of “Mel’s mix,” which is 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite. This might actually be the most tricky part of the whole process. Home Depot didn’t have vermiculite, and it seemed a little pricey when I asked about it at the Ann Arbor Home and Garden store; of course, that is easily the most expensive and/or over-priced store in town. Stay tuned….
I was in two NCAA pools this year, one with my father and about a dozen of his friends and relatives, and one with my friend Bruce, who have been “betting” on the tourney since we lived across the hall from each other in Quadrangle Hall at the University of Iowa in 1984. In both pools, I had MSU, UConn, UNC, and Pitt in the finals, and I had MSU and UNC in the final game. In the pool with my dad, I picked UNC; in the pool with Bruce, I picked MSU. I don’t remember the reason for these different choices, but it turns out I won both pools.
So I got that going for me.
More important though, Will and I got to go see the final game last night. My parents bought tickets for the tourney through the lottery system, they went to the games Saturday night, and gave me and Will the tickets for Monday night. Here’s is a link to my Flickr set of pictures from the game; here are a few highlights:
Of course, we got lost getting into town. I always do going to Detroit. But we did navigate to a parking deck right next to Ford Field for the privilege of paying $40 for a parking spot. As I will get to in a moment, that was worth every cent.
Will and I walked around a bit and did a little souvenir shopping, but we decided to pass on going over to Cobo center. I think that the cold and the snow kind of dissuaded us. Had we come into town a little earlier, it might have been different. And had Will been 21, it would have been much different: the main activity before the game seemed to be drinking at one of the many bars and tents connected to bars, and that might have been a fun way to pass the afternoon before the game.
I would say MSU fans outnumbered UNC fans about 15 to 1. Lots of Sparty-wear on the streets and in the arena. I wore my Eastern Michigan hoodie sweatshirt because while not a direct alliance to MSU, it is green and white. So it represented my “on the fence but leaning” take on the game.
Ford Field is a very nice facility, and the next time that EMU plays football there (which has happened about once a year for the last couple years), I’m going. Heck, I might even go see the Lions next year. In one sense, our tickets were terrible: about halfway up the last section in an end zone end of the arena, which meant the court was literally about a quarter of a mile away. But this wasn’t as bad as you might think. I still feel like we got a pretty decent view of the game, and with the big-screen TVs at the top of the stadium, it wasn’t that different from watching it on TV.
Everyone I dealt with was extremely polite and well-behaved. That includes the fans, the people taking tickets, the security folks, the hot dog lady, the dude who gave me foolproof directions out of town, everyone. It was almost as if Detroiters and Michiganders had some kind of collective mission to put a warm and happy face on a scruffy and run-down town and state.
At half-time, UNC had managed to score the most points in a half in NCAA playoff history and they were ahead of a lackluster MSU team by 20 points. And it was 10:15 pm. Will said “let’s go,” and I didn’t disagree. While plenty of other people left early, my very close (albeit over-priced) parking space meant that we were out of the stadium and on I-75 and then I-94 back to Ypsi in a matter of minutes. In fact, we got home early enough for me to watch the last seven minutes of the game on TV (and Will and I clearly didn’t miss much), and also to see a local news report on the massive traffic jam after the game ended. We would have been there until one in the morning had we stayed.
So an excellent time all in all and a huge thank you to my parents for the tickets!
When I last left my travel log updates, I was in the historic Linden Row Inn. Now I am in a less historic hotel in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where we are visiting an old friend from PhD studies. At one point, Annette had grand plans of hikes on some nearby trail through the bucolic hills. But with the wind howling and being more or less “tourist-ed out,” I think the plan is to meet our friend, go to her house, and eat pizza and drink beer.
Anyway, a few highlight from where I left off before:
Thursday night we met Dennis Danvers for computer fun and dinner. Dennis and I were in the MFA program at the same time at Virginia Commonwealth University, which means I have known him and been friends with him now for over 20 years. Kinda scary. And also interesting is that I think we’ve become better friends since I left Richmond in 1993 via email.
Anyway, we went over to his house first so I could help him update the software he’s using to run his web site, a job that I thought would take about 15 minutes. Instead, I screwed it up royal and I had to restore one of the two backups I wisely made before I began the process. Oh, and while I was doing that, Will and Annette played with Dennis’ incredibly energetic dog, Ethel.
But I’m happy to say that all is back to the way that Dennis’ web site was before I started, so no harm, no foul. Still, after causing Dennis some obvious worry, I thought the least I could do was buy at Cajun Bangkok, which was a fusion restaurant of sorts between Cajun and Thai food. It was a fine time– a very sweet and shy waitress, good food, and the fusion stuff worked pretty well for me. I had chicken-fried steak (though it was actually “chicken-fried chicken”) with a peanut sauce. And we talked and tried to convince Dennis to sign up for Facebook and appreciate the joys of the iPhone, both unsuccessfully.
Friday morning, we had breakfast at Joe’s Inn, which is a kind of “must stop” for us whenever we are in Richmond (which isn’t often, really). Dennis joined us again, and there was much chatting of science fiction, fantasy, and young adult readings, mostly between Annette and Dennis. Then we took a little walking tour that included stops at Annette’s parent’s house before they moved to Florida and a bit of a stroll down Monument Avenue.
Then it was on the road again to Harrisonburg (with a brief drive-through visit in Staunton, where Annette had her first reporting job way back when, and which has become in recent years kind of a quaint and quasi-touristy sort of town) to visit Mary. And there’s not much to report there, though with homemade pizza, wine/beer, and complicated television in the form of the new series Dollhouse, it did feel a lot like the way we often would get together in Bowling Green. Thanks Mary for good times and also for letting us watch the kooky new Dollhouse instead of your usual Friday Night Lights.
And that’s pretty much it. Back on the road today to Ypsilanti, hopefully an uneventful trip.
This morning, I am making a trip down memory lane while simultaneously and electronically clinging to the present. We are staying in the Linden Row Inn in downtown Richmond, the same hotel where Annette and I had our wedding rehearsal dinner and where family stayed that weekend. But this morning, while Annette and Will sleep in a bit, I am also making some updates to the online classes I’m teaching and I’m listening to Michigan Public radio on my iPhone. In other words, I’m pretty much doing what I would be doing on a Friday morning in Ypsilanti, only I’m doing it in Richmond instead.
Anyway, my internet access has improved and I did manage to upload photos to a Flickr set here. A few highlights/recollections of the last couple days:
On Wednesday and almost as an after-thought, we started our day at the National Museum of the American Indian, which I thought was awesome on many levels. They had a great collection of artifacts and information, cool multimedia presentations, and it did an amazing job of emphasizing the subjectivity and “presentness” of history. It was a sort of postmodern museum, in my view. I’d say more, but maybe later. In any event, I’d call this a “must see” for the DC visitor, personally.
If you do go to the National Museum of the American Indian, take the tip we took from a guy we struck up a conversation with on the metro: eat lunch in the cafeteria. They had a great mix of quasi-authentic native peoples foods.
Went to the air and space museum, which was okay (Will thought it was great, of course), and which was also weirdly empty, which is another tip: going off-season to DC does make a difference.
I think the consensus was we were kind of “museum-ed out” by then, so we went back to the hotel, chilled for a while, and then went to Petits Plats on the recommendation of the Concierge. My steak and fries was very good; Annette’s salmon was actually over-cooked for her (and that’s saying something); and Will’s calamari was not fried as he had assumed (though it was quite good). But if ever go to this place, get the mussels. We had an appetizer portion that was fantastic, and they serve dinner portions in giant, heaping bowls. And Monday was “all you could eat” mussels night. Makes me want to stay a few more days.
Went to Fredericksburg for lunch with Laura and her friend Jim. A very nice time, and some interesting conversation about the not so bright future of the newspaper business (Laura and Jim work for a newspaper). After lunch and some shopping, we took a tour of an old time Apothecary that was pretty cool.
But more later– now it’s on to breakfast at Joe’s.
It’s been a pretty busy spring and summer this year, but we’ve still had time to have a fine and successful square-foot garden experiment on the side of the house. Back in mid-April, it was pretty much just a plot with dirt. Now here we are in mid-July, and the garden is going mad. Here’s a link to the set so far; a few highlights:
